After I returned from our weekend away, the garden demanded my attention. A couple of the tomato plants had lurched over into the pea gravel path, obscuring it completely. Some beautiful, ripe tomatoes, had rotted on the vine, as the weight of it dragged them to the ground. I sighed and assessed the situation. It didn’t matter how beautiful they were if they were rotting before they could even be harvested. That morning I gathered as many as I could get to and lugged my bounty back to the house in two large bins. I roasted two pans of tomatoes with garlic and olive oil, and I made eight cups of mediocre salsa and still had enough to give a basket away and keep a pile on my counter. I thought through how to address the overgrowth.

Of course I’m not the first to notice it, but I am struck by how gardening is a metaphor for life, for love. We planted on a bright afternoon with high hopes and piles of chicken poop. We were intentional; we surrounded our tomatoes with basil for nitrogen; we isolated our peppers and root vegetables and guided our pole beans up a trellis; we watered and waited. We’ve had more failure than success.

When we returned from a week away, I was delighted to see that our bell peppers had finally grown taller, though they were still not producing. The next day, I looked at the small, basil lookalike I had just uprooted and asked Google what sweet pepper plants look like before gently replanting it. Those tall “pepper plants” were actually tall, thriving weeds with shallow roots. I couldn’t believe how easy they were to remove once I identified them, or how sparse that bed looked once they were gone. They were blocking the sun from my tiny pepper plants that, two weeks later, are finally sporting hopeful flowers waiting for pollinating. It may or may not be too late for them.

Anne Lamott says, “The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things... And what a wonderful relief, every so often, to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it.”

Sometimes I get busy with the kids, or lazy, or I don’t feel like covering myself from head to toe to protect myself while I toil in the sun, and I let the garden languish. I don’t water; I assume the rain will hold it, assume there couldn’t be that many tomatoes or pole beans to harvest, assure myself my husband can do it later—I can do it later—it will be fine. The work I’ve already done will sustain it.

I’ve cultivated a family: birthed and am raising children; I nurture them and love them, and I work to maintain a marriage and neither are really so unlike gardening. Sometimes I get busy or distracted or lazy or selfish and I let my parenting or my marriage languish. Maybe I don’t ask questions like I really want to know the answers; maybe I don’t listen attentively; maybe I don’t look my husband in the eye; maybe I forget to kiss him like I mean it; maybe I keep my head down on my tasks when I should let them go to sow time into our love.

In the garden, I’ve found, the longer I stop tending the more hesitant I am to get back to it. We tend the garden in our next door neighbors’ yard, on the other side of the new fence that now has a “neighbor gate.” I can see the tops of my tomato and bean plants peeking over the top. But after a period of neglect, I am reluctant to see the damage that can only be pinned on me.

Typically, when I get over there, I am greeted with a garden grown wild. Initially, it seems great—new growth everywhere. But, upon closer inspection, I see the tomato plants have grown so tall they have fallen over on themselves; their fruit so heavy it cannot be supported. The stakes I used before to sure up the plants are still stuck in the soil helplessly; their placement no longer providing assurance that the plant will hold. So beautiful tomatoes hang on the ground, where they meet their demise, by opportunistic insects who did not take the day off, or they rot. Still others ripen perfectly and must be discarded because their time for harvest has passed; it passed while I was busy not tending my garden.

And I don’t have to tell you, but I will; it’s really not different with love. I have been searching for months for a quote I just know is in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and I don’t think I’m going to find it. In high school I had it scrawled on an index card in a plastic Quik container I had repurposed to hold my favorite quotes, but now it’s gone and not even Google can help me determine whether it was really The Grapes of Wrath or My Antonia or whether I made it up entirely. One day I’ll reread them both, but for now I will paraphrase: “No one plants a tree and then just lets it wither and says, ‘I guess it was not meant to be.’ But they do that all the time with their loves.”

So when I am not actively tending to my marriage, ensuring it’s health, dead heading the flowers, trimming back the overgrowth, harvesting the fruit, picking the weeds, and showering it with what it needs, there will be consequences. They may not show immediately; for a while, they may even look like growth. But I want our love to grow up, strong, together— in the confines of the structure we’ve built to support it—not, like my tomatoes, which have entangled themselves with each other, blocking the basil from the light and lunged out of their beds and across the path, making it impassable. I’ve had to discard a regrettable amount of wasted fruit from those plants because they didn’t receive the care they needed. I don’t want to do that with my love.

The garden has reminded me not to wait until needs are emergent and pressing to address them. Water before the ground is parched, trim back overgrowth before it causes trouble to adjacent plants, pull weeds before they choke out the roots, harvest fruit before it rots on the vine.

I walked back into our yard the other day, in jeans and a chambray shirt, sneakers, gloves and baseball cap, drenched in sweat, shears in hand and dragging a 39 gallon bag of overgrowth and rotten tomatoes behind me. We are eating from our garden or preserving what we can’t eat most days. But the work I did yesterday does not excuse me from working again today—it might make today’s work lighter, more enjoyable—but I don’t get a pass. I can’t rest on yesterday’s harvest, or the health of the garden yesterday any more than I can remember good times in our marriage and assume they will hold us now or in the future. They won’t—they can’t. I can’t assume my husband will do the jobs I committed to, although sometimes he does. I must accept the risk, when I neglect my garden, that I am putting it all at risk—everything we’ve worked for, how far we’ve come.

Our garden is a mess. A beautiful, imperfect mess full of all manner of insects and one enormous garden spider that has caused me to abandon at least one tomato for fear of becoming too well acquainted with her. But it’s our mess, and it’s bearing fruit. And it’s provided me with more than pesto, more than the 13 pints of tomatoes I’ve canned, or the sauce in my freezer or the salsa in my fridge. It’s taught me about the importance of daily care, and the consequences of neglect.

My five-year-old daughter, Emerie, had a recent epiphany about swimming. She's had it planned for months. We have a pool in our backyard, and last year something clicked for her older sister, when she went from clinging to the coping stones to jumping off the diving board and swimming clear across the pool. Emerie was unfazed. Despite lessons and coaxing and encouraging, she just wasn't ready.

Daniel and I had mentioned to her, in anticipation of opening the pool this spring, "Em, I think this is going to be your year." We overheard her confidently relaying that message to her grandfather, "Well Pop Pop," she had said, "Today is my year, so I'm going to be a great swimmer."

We opened the pool, and not much changed, but she kept reminding us, "Today is my year." Then a couple of weeks ago and out of nowhere, the little girl who would bob her head in the water only up to her eyelids got horizontal and started actually swimming. She still wore her puddle jumper but went off the slide and diving board for the first time (and then the second and third in rapid succession), with a broad and confident smile. "What happened, Em?" I asked, amazed.

"I told you, Mommy," she shrugged, "today is my year."

Demonstrating her superpowers as "The Purple Dash"

Daniel and I have both made changes this year that we've talked about making for years. We talked about the need, we talked about the implementation, maybe we even started to make the changes, but they never stuck. We stalled and stopped and started and stalled again. This year we were quieter about it as we gained momentum. We talk about it now, all the time. On our vacation last week I took advantage of Deacon's early wake-up time and his inability to keep quiet while the rest of the house slept and ran the 2.5 mile loop to the little historical village down the road from our house. One day Daniel ran with me, and I laughed, "Isn't it funny how many years we talked about doing this? How impossible it felt and how we just didn't have the time? And now it turns out we're both investing only about 3-5 hours per week that were there all along. It's kind of embarrassing." He agreed.

On one of my runs I listened to the song "The Great Unknown," by Jukebox the Ghost. I remarked later to Daniel about the line, "There's a thousand voices saying, 'the time is now.'"

It's so funny how empowering and sexy these songs and messages can be: The Time is Now! Change your Life! And I'm like, "Yes! I'm totally going to!"

Until it's 90 degrees and the air feels like soup and my kid is up too early so he has to come and it's time to run.When I am running down the street, I am not usually feeling empowered. I'm feeling tired and sweaty.

Or when it's 5:25 and I'm staring at a too-low word count through bleary eyes and even I'm not buying the words I'm writing-- they're all crap. When I am sitting on the couch gazing at a screen that lacks the brilliance I had planned, or at a content calendar that I'm woefully behind on, I am not feeling like a Great American Writer. I'm feeling like a failure who should probably stop calling herself a writer.It turns out, in the moment, doing the things that have to be done is actually terrible. Change is so much less exciting than it promises to be. I fall off the wagon and drag myself back up again.

I watch Emerie swim, albeit still very much a struggling beginner. But I marvel at her pride as she explains to others, how it came to be that she couldn't swim at all and now she can, as if she is now an Olympic great. "Well," she says, "today is my year."

Maybe today is my year. I wrote an underwhelming blog post! Later I might go to yoga and fall out of a pose or hobble my way through my three-mile run. I might lose my patience with my children forty percent less often than I usually do, or maybe I'll apologize for it without being prompted by my seven-year-old. The sky's the limit, friends.

About Me

Christina | Virginia BeachPsuedo Yankee, city-loving former working mom of four finds herself home with the kids and transplanted to the somewhat Southern suburbs. Finding her feet while still attempting to harness the power of the passion of her youth for useful good.